August 31, 2000: Fable and Reality ­ the 'Shining Path'

During a trip to Latin America this summer, Stefan Engel and Monika
Gärtner-Engel, members of the MLPD Central Committee, also visited
Peru.
In Peru, the Marxist-Leninists are confronted with the task of
rebuilding a
Marxist-Leninist party. The Marxist-Leninist and working-class movement
in
Peru has suffered from a serious defeat. Under the influence of
petty-bourgeois parliamentarism, the
PC del Peru (patria roja ­ Communist Party
of Peru/Red Fatherland), which, in the nineteen-eighties, was strongly
represented particularly in the United Left (IU), changed into a
revisionist
party. The guerilla movement Sendero luminoso (Shining Path) which also
raised the claim of being a Marxist-Leninist party, suffered from a
crushing
defeat. The movement has disappeared almost completely from societal
life.
Its leaders, among them the internationally known former professor of
philosophy, Guzmán, were arrested. The MLPD declares its solidarity
with
the struggle for the release of political prisoners. At the same time,
it is
necessary to look more closely into the reasons of the defeat of
Sendero
luminoso. As soon as in 1988, Stefan Engel made a trip to Peru, and in
1989,
the book Peru ­ die Lunte am Pulverfass Lateinamerika (Peru ­ A Fuse to
the Powder-Keg Latin America) was published. The chapter on the
development of the "Shining Path" throws light upon the backgrounds of
this
movement and the ideological-political causes of its subsequent
failure. The
book also discusses what to think about the "Shining Path's" adherence
to
Mao Zedong Thought. Therefore, we publish excerpts from the book in
Rote
Fahne. These excerpts are also translated into English and Spanish and
are available in the international section of the MLPD homepage, under
www.mlpd.de. We are about to prepare an article on the development of the
PC del Peru (patria roja) for one of the next issues.

No one who studies the current situation in Peru can avoid coming across the
guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso ("Shining Path"). You are confronted with
it if you want to or not because of the incessant news coverage in the
bourgeois press. However, you hear and see less of this movement in connection
with the mass struggles of the peasants in the highlands, of the farm workers
in the sugar cooperatives, of the metal workers and miners in La Oroya or the
struggles of university students and teachers. I am even convinced that its
influence will decrease in the same degree that the revolutionary fighting
spirit takes hold of the broad masses of the Peruvian people.

The Poverty of Phraseology

It is not easy to deal in an objective way with the ideological-political line
and the corresponding practice of the "Peruvian Communist Party for the Shining
Path of José Mariátegui." One reason is that the bourgeois press,
of course, is inclined to lump everything together - the terror of the
guerrillas and the state terror of the military - in a mixture of truths,
half-truths and lies with the tendency to justify the latter with the former.
The other reason is that the scanty publications of this party bristle with
rhetoric and general platitudes. There is repeated mention of the "omnipotence
of Marxism-Leninism" and of Lenin's demand for "a concrete analysis of concrete
conditions." But you look almost in vain for something that is concretely
analyzed in these publications.

Its verbal adherence to Mao Zedong Thought, its condemnation of the restoration
of capitalism in the People's Republic of China through Deng Xiao Ping, and its
categorical rejection of the attacks on Mao Zedong Thought by the Party of
Labor of Albania and Enver Hoxha have caused the "Shining Path" to be
classified as Marxist-Leninist also within the international Marxist-Leninist
and working-class movement.

Let us now turn to examine the contents of what is hailed as "
Marxist-Leninist-Maoist."

The Strategy of Liberated Areas

The "Shining Path" develops the following thesis in its publication, "Develop
the Growing Protest of the People": "The democratic, antifeudal and
anti-imperialist revolution requires that the armed struggle is unfolded from
the countryside into the city via the building of revolutionary bases as nuclei
of the new state; simultaneously, this is a process of gradually destroying the
old reactionary state and the bureaucracy of the big landowners." (9/1979)

Mao Zedong particularly emphasizes in his work, "Why Is It That Red Political
Power Can Exist in China?":

"The long-term survival inside a country of one or more small areas under Red
political power completely encircled by a White regime is a phenomenon that has
never occurred anywhere else in the world. There are special reasons for this
unusual phenomenon. It can exist and develop only under certain conditions."
(Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, Vol. I, p. 64)

Does Peru fulfill the conditions that, according to Mao Zedong, are necessary
in order to be able to apply the strategy of liberated areas? Mao Zedong
continues on this question:

"It is a feature of semi-colonial China that, since the first year of the
Republic (1912), the various cliques of old and new war lords have waged
incessant wars against one another, supported by imperialism from abroad and by
the comprador and landlord classes at home. Such a phenomenon is to be found in
none of the imperialist countries nor for that matter in any colony under
direct imperialist rule, but only in a country like China which is under
indirect imperialist rule. Two things account for its occurrence, namely, a
localized agricultural economy (not a unified capitalist economy) and the
imperialist policy of marking off spheres of influence in order to divide and
exploit. The prolonged splits and wars within the White regime provide a
condition for the emergence and persistence of one or more small Red areas
under the leadership of the Communist Party amidst the encirclement of the
White regime." (Ibid., p. 65; emphasis by the Author)

Even though Peru is neocolonially dependent on imperialism, semi-feudal
obstacles still exist in the countryside, and its industry is still
underdeveloped, the conditions are completely different from those that Mao
Zedong described in respect to China. Compared to China, the class
contradictions between the domestic capitalists and the imperialists on the one
hand and the working class on the other are much more developed. The exercise
of political power in Peru takes place through a unified state apparatus that
directly confronts the revolutionary movement. In China, the different
imperialists waged war against each other on Chinese soil, indirectly providing
room for maneuver to the revolutionary movement. In addition to that, the
Chinese state apparatus was extremely underdeveloped and hardly able to exist
on its own. The Red Army was easily able to deal with such an adversary.

Neither does Peru fulfill the second essential condition, by no means since
1980:

"Second, the regions where China's Red political power has first emerged and is
able to last for a long time have not been those unaffected by the democratic
revolution, ... but regions ... where the masses of workers, peasants and
soldiers rose in great numbers in the course of the bourgeois-democratic
revolution of 1926 and 1927. In many parts of these provinces trade unions and
peasant associations were formed on a wide scale, and many economic and
political struggles were waged by the working class and the peasantry against
the landlord class and the bourgeoisie." (Ibid.)

Although there were bitter struggles of the working class, peasants and
teachers at the end of the military dictatorship of Morales Bermudéz,
they had no revolutionary character yet. In 1980, the military dictatorship was
not overthrown by a revolution; a bourgeois democracy replaced it because a
revolutionary development was actually to be prevented. The guerrillas of
Sendero Luminoso began their guerrilla warfare in 1980 when there was no
revolutionary mass movement, neither on a national nor a regional scale. We now
come to the third feature that Mao Zedong points out:

"Third, whether it is possible for the people's political power in small areas
to last depends on whether the nation-wide revolutionary situation continues to
develop. If it does, then the small Red areas will undoubtedly last for a long
time, and will, moreover, inevitably become one of the many forces for winning
nation-wide political power. If the nation-wide revolutionary situation does
not continue to develop but stagnates for a fairly long time, then it will be
impossible for the small Red areas to last long." (Ibid., p. 66)

Sendero justifies its sectarian strategy with the completely non-Marxist theory
that there is a permanently revolutionary situation in a developing country
like Peru. This does not have much in common with a concrete analysis of
concrete conditions. Exactly because Peru is a capitalist country - even though
relatively underdeveloped and dependent on imperialism - it is true what Lenin
explains to be a fundamental condition for a successful revolution:

"Revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the
exploited and the exploiters). It follows that, for a revolution to take place,
it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority
of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully
realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die
for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental
crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics..., weakens the
government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow
it." (Lenin, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 343)

The strategy of Sendero is non-Marxist in theory, in practice it failed long
ago. The state of emergency declared in Ayacucho and the tremendous state
terror of the military caused Sendero to lose its original base in this Andes
region long ago. Although Sendero's commandos are spread over large areas of
the country and their number is now estimated at 3,000 to 7,000 armed
supporters altogether, they have not, however, been able to grow firm roots
among the broad masses of the people.

"Armed Propaganda" Instead of Patient Persuasion Work

Sendero sees it as its main task to involve the masses increasingly in the
people's war by "armed propaganda." In an interview with the newspaper
El Diario of July 24, 1988, Guzmán, called "President Gonzalo,"
puts it this way: "We hope that we advance with more theory and revolutionary
practice, with more armed actions, with more people's war, with more power to
the very hearts of the class and the people and really win them over... ."
Lenin deals with the fundamental aspects of this problem in his essay
Guerrilla Warfare:

"In the first place, Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by
not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It recognizes
the most varied forms of struggle; and it does not "concoct" them, but only
generalizes, organizes, gives conscious expression to those forms of struggle
of the revolutionary classes which arise of themselves in the course of the
movement. Absolutely hostile to all abstract formulas and to all doctrinaire
recipes, Marxism demands an attentive attitude to the mass struggle in
progress, which, as the movement develops, as the class consciousness of the
masses grows, as economic and political crisis become acute, continually gives
rise to new and more varied methods of defense and attack. Marxism, therefore,
positively does not reject any form of struggle....

In the second place, Marxism demands an absolutely historical
examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question
apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand
the rudiments of dialectical materialism.... To attempt to answer yes or no to
the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without
making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given moment at
the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist
position.

These are the two principal theoretical propositions by which we must be
guided." (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11, pp. 213-223)

From the outset, Guzmán restricts the forms of struggle to armed action,
isolated from the level of consciousness of the masses, isolated from the mass
struggles which the workers, peasants, teachers and students are actually
waging in a given situation. The immense schematism with which this genius of a
party leader "Gonzalo" regards the struggles of the workers is revealed in
another part of the interview: When the workers bring production to a
standstill, it would be the task of the party "to advance the strike like a
school of war, like a school of communism. It must develop their strikes
further as a basic form of struggle in the economic sphere, but one which must
be inseparably connected under the present conditions with the conquest of
power. It therefore follows that we connect the struggle for the demands with
the people's war, with the struggle for the conquest of power... ."

A worker from Peru described to us what hair-raising scenes Gonzalo's basic
idea produces:

"On Saturday, March 27, the Senderistas introduced themselves at a meeting of
the workers of the arms plant. The workers allowed them to speak. At the end of
their statement, the Senderistas promised to always carry dynamite with them in
support of the workers when a demonstration takes place. However, the workers
unanimously rejected that." (Statement of Jacinto Irala of April 4, 1988)

Such "connection of the strike with the people's war" can only deter the
workers from revolutionary struggle at the best. Instead of patient work among
the workers, raising their political consciousness by starting from their
experience in struggle, Sendero objectively carries division into their ranks
by putting off the more backward of the workers. In addition, they
unnecessarily provoke the state apparatus and thus risk the lives and health of
the fighting workers. This provocative policy goes so far that Guzmán
even declares in the above-mentioned interview in El Diario: "One must
provoke a coup d'état." Compelling the masses of the people, with the
help of the unleashed state terror of a murdering soldiery, to wage a people's
war - what does all this have to do with the Marxist-Leninist strategy and
tactics of the democratic and anti-imperialist revolution? Again and again,
Lenin took issue with petty-bourgeois revolutionism:

"To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a
party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point. Insurrection must
rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second
point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning-point in the history of
the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is
at it height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and
in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the
revolution are strongest. That is the third point. And these three
conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from
Blanquism." ("Marxism and Insurrection," Lenin, Selected Works in
three volumes, Vol. 2, p. 331)

Democratic Revolution or Petty-Bourgeois Putschism

More than 12,000 people were killed since 1980 in Peru according to Peruvian
institutions and the international organization in support of political
prisoners, Amnesty International. These were not only victims of the state
terror by the military, of the right-wing death squadrons "Rodrigo Franco," or
casualties of the armed skirmishes between the Senderistas and the military.
Some were also victims of the punitive actions by the Senderistas against
workers and peasants who did not wish to submit to the Senderistas' directives.
It is definitely credible when the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung
writes in an article of December 23, 1988:

"The 'Shining Path' threatened to kill the people of the Ayacucho district of
the Andes in case they went to work or opened the schools during an "armed
strike" which the guerrilla leaders had given orders to carry out."

Moreover it is an indisputable fact that, time and again, mayors of small
villages or other officials are publicly executed by the Senderistas as
traitors. Often they do not even bother to differentiate between members of
bourgeois parties and those of the United Left. "Parliamentary deputies of Left
parties" - according to the Senderistas - "are monsters who help build the
fascist state" (from the magazine Blätter des iz3w, No. 108, March
1983). This policy of the Senderistas is not supported in any way by Mao Zedong
either. On the contrary, he fought in a determined way against such
manifestations:

"The Party organization in the Red Army has already waged struggles against
putschism, but not yet to a sufficient extent. Therefore, remnants of this
ideology still exist in the Red Army. Their manifestations are: (1) blind
action regardless of subjective and objective conditions; (2) inadequate and
irresolute application of the Party's policies for the cities; (3) slack
military discipline, especially in moments of defeat; (4) acts of house-burning
by some units; and (5) the practices of shooting deserters and of inflicting
corporal punishment, both of which smack of putschism. In its social origins,
putschism is a combination of lumpen-proletarian and petty-bourgeois
ideology." (Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, Vol. I, pp. 114-115.)

Rejection of Parliamentary Elections--a Revolutionary
Policy?

When he was asked about his position in regard to elections, Guzmán
answered in the above-mentioned interview:

"The most important thing in regard to elections is to boycott them or, if
possible, to prevent them. Why do we hold such a position? What will the people
gain? Nothing! Nothing can be gained by these new elections; I believe that
this a plain fact in the history of this country.... We have proved already how
the percentage of the votes for the IU (United Left) prevented the majority
from taking a stand against the elections.... The tendency in Peru today is to
expect nothing, neither from a new government nor from the elections, to reject
the elections. What is the problem? It is that revisionism and opportunism
today continue to participate in the elections."

Guzmán gets illogical here. Either the broad masses have come to reject
elections already, in that case the revisionists and opportunists could
participate in elections as much as they want, they would suffer a defeat. Or
the question of elections is not settled yet in the eyes of the broad masses;
this will show in the votes for the revisionists and opportunists. I will take
recourse to Lenin for the last time to demonstrate how little Sendero Luminoso
has understood Marxism-Leninism. Lenin points out in his article "Left-Wing"
Communism - An Infantile Disorder

"that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the
parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary
proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward
strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and
enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses.
Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every
other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because
it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the
priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk
turning into nothing but windbags." (Lenin, Selected Works in three
volumes, Vol. 3, p. 322)

In Peru, petty-bourgeois revolutionism has undoubtedly become an important
social manifestation which essentially feeds on the lack of a perspective on
the side of disillusioned youth and petty-bourgeois intellectuals. In a way, it
reflects the weaknesses of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard in leading the
revolutionary movement correctly appropriate to the revolutionary fermentation
taking place among the masses. Lenin also points this out in the article
mentioned earlier:

"Guerrilla warfare is an inevitable form of struggle at a time when the mass
movement has actually reached the point of an uprising and when fairly large
intervals occur between the "big engagements" in the Civil War.

It is not guerrilla actions which disorganize the movement, but the weakness of
a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control.
That is why the anathemas which we Russians usually hurl against guerrilla
actions go hand in hand with secret, casual, unorganized guerrilla actions
which really do disorganize the party. Being incapable of understanding what
historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of
neutralizing its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is
engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to
eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against
guerrilla warfare are complaints against our party weakness in the matter of an
uprising." (Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 11, pp. 213-223)

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